Science Girls

The storyline is lighthearted and often humorous, but rather short. Most of the gameplay is exploration and combat. Instead of traditional JRPG classes, each character has a specific science they specialise in, which affects how they fight. Psychological science girl can encourage allies or demotivate enemies, chemical science girl hurls chemicals at enemies and can poison them, and so on. However, the combat gets repetitive and boring real quickly; in my experience (playing on the highest difficulty), I find myself spending most of my turns defending and stalling for time to save up the SP I need for my attacks. This is further exacerbated by some enemies having decent evasion. Combat also takes place fairly frequently, as enemies can chase you on the map, and move faster than you. Also, it kinda makes no sense that units in the front row spamming defend will regenerate SP faster than those idling in the back row, I'd think it should be the other way around. I got this on discount for under a dollar so I can't complain, but I honestly don't think it is worth its full asking price. Might be worth picking up whenever it goes on sale though.

Disappointment All Around I was hoping for a burn based tactics, what I got was a game that felt like it was designed by a high school Game Development class as a final project. It's like a collection of game parts that sound OK on their own, but never come together at all. The setting and characters work fine, but they try the slap on a flimsy explanation that wasn't fully hashed out and never amounts to anything. Next it the combat. There is no strategy and the closest thing to tactics in the game is the Hypnotize-Defend loop to regain SP (more on that later). Once you get out of the school, basic attacks are useless, and high cost and low return. Next comes the RPG elements. Stat scaling is a joke. With each level, you gain 1 stat point you can use to improve a base stat or unlock a new rank on your skills. This means you have to choose between stats or skills. Choosing stats is a waist because your skills will be worthless. But leveling up skills makes them cost more but not that much more effective. Then then there are the recovery items <sigh>. When the average SP cost of a skill is 10 and your strongest SP recovery item give you 5, you may as well not have recovery items. Thus the only way to gain SP in a meaningful way is to have a single opponent, stun them and use Defend (which grands SP to the user and bonus SP if all front row party members are defending at the same time) over and over until you have replenished your SP then finish the fight. But wait, there's still the VN elements in there. I don't just mean how the dialog is presented in a VN style. The girls have profiles that list likes and giving them a recovery item that fits their likes, they gain double the bonus. Still not enough to be worth it though so why have such a random mechanic in the first place. This game feels like it had a Character/Settings designer, a game play designer and an RPG mechanics designer that were all making a game on their own, and they just patched them together. I don't think I will bet buying another game from this developer.